Millions of media items are published on a daily basis, but only a relative handful become wildly popular. The popularity of a media item (or “media content”) can be related to how many different places it is published and how frequently it is provided to users, posted, forwarded, marked as important or otherwise shared by users. Extensive sharing of a media item can benefit from the so-called “network effect,” whereby a person can share a media item with several friends, each of whom can share it with several friends and so on. A media item that is widely shared and gains a high degree of popularity due to the network effect is said to have gone “viral,” and may be called a “viral media item”. The message may contain an identifier corresponding to a member of a social network, may include an account credential corresponding to an account on a social network, or the like. Alternatively or in addition, an identifier may be an email address, a telephone number, an online account name, a short messaging service address, and an application address